


solace

by MathildaHilda



Category: Dark (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - No Time Travel, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Death of Minors, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Death, Implied/Referenced Experimentation, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Instead of Time Travel it's Murder with a capital M, Not Canon Compliant, Vague as fuck about a lot of things, this is very sad y'all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-06-25 07:23:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19740940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: It’s Wöller that finds him, three weeks after he disappears.





	solace

**Author's Note:**

> This thing's been in my drafts for so long I forgot I even had it, so with some few rewrites and Further Questions of my own Psyche, here you go!
> 
> This work was translated into Russian, [here](https://ficbook.net/readfic/8426144) by the wonderful [blackout!](https://ficbook.net/authors/820429?show=about#profile-tabs)

It’s Wöller that finds him, three weeks after he disappears.

It’s a gruesome enough scene that the man bangs his head on the ceiling, scrambles backward out of sudden fright when the boy’s pale eyes stares up at him, and he keeps his mouth shut except for the times he shouts into the phone.

It’s three weeks, and that is enough time for Bartosz Tiedemann to wander into the woods and find Helge Doppler with a stolen car wrapped around a tree, and it is enough time for Ulrich Nielsen to stumble back into Winden with a hypothermic boy in his arms, begging for reprieve and a blanket.

It’s enough time, for Mikkel to come back home.

It’s enough time, for Wöller to lead a search into the caves, and find Jonas Kahnwald’s bloodshot eyes, behind a carved door; battered, and bruised, and alone.

~

There’s no stranger in Winden that November, apart from the people called in from neighboring towns to help search for the ones who are missing, and the occasional surge of reporters.

There’s no mystery, no whispers between families about others. There’s no time travel. There’s nothing more than three murders where such a thing has never happened in the first place.

There’s still a fight between Katharina and Regina in the corridors of the school, still Katharina’s rage once Ulrich disappears and Hannah is feigning confusion and ignorance.

It’s still there. It will always be there.

Bartosz goes looking for Jonas the day after he’s reported missing, a few days after their fight, and he finds nothing more than a dead and broken old man, face scarred from abuse by other hands than cars and a violent, grief-stricken Ulrich Nielsen.

Michael Kahnwald is just another person lost to life, found barely alive in the woods thirty-three years earlier by a woman who came to love him as her own.

(Michael isn’t really Mikkel, but whose to say that he isn’t?)

Jonas is the last to disappear, and he is the first to be found.

He isn’t the first to die because of the belief of time travel, but he is the first to be found, hidden away in a cave where he might’ve sought solace from whosoever followed behind.

There’s no solace for broken boys, where nothing was ever really whole in the first place.

Charlotte Doppler leads the search around the cave, in the hours after Wöller stumbled upon Jonas, with machines and dogs and old clues and whatnots and empty promises to families who have long since given up the idea of getting anyone back alive.

They find Yasin between the cave and the quarry, the boy so young and looking so much like he’s asleep, that the coroner doesn’t allow for Charlotte to enter. She still finds the photographs, and she’s the one chosen to tell the world.

They find Erik next, and Charlotte holds his mother’s hand when they tell her, and when she later demands to see him. She demands, and they all comply.

The boy, with eyes plucked from their sockets in a pale and freckled face, and with the blood and dirt now long since washed away, looks anything but asleep on the table, and Charlotte does, now, desperately wish for time travel of any form, if only just to spare the boy from any pain.

They find Jonas first, and maybe someone does pity Hannah Kahnwald when she kneels on the floor when Wöller tells her in the dark halls of the station. Maybe someone does pity her, when she grips his arm tight, and pulls the man to the floor with her, and weeps into his shoulder.

Someone, somewhere, _does_ pity Hannah Kahnwald, because young Jonas was never supposed to die in the first place. But in a space where time travel, for once, doesn’t exist, what was there supposed to be of the boy instead?

They don’t show her his throat, laid bare and scarred and broken as it is, and tucks the sheet underneath his chin, but someone does tell the papers.

Hannah spends the rest of her life thinking that her son met mostly the same end as her husband.

His throat is torn, ripped and broken from coarse rope and rough hands, and some details, thankfully, never makes it into the paper.

It is better so, but when doesn’t withholding the truth paint an even more bitter picture?

~

They search the area around the caves for a month, and by then three boys are buried and mourned, and a fourth lies asleep in a bed at home, adventures in woods and caves hidden from view from anyone who asks.

Mikkel doesn’t talk about it, doesn’t tell his crying mother or his solemn father, but he does mention one thing, one night when Martha brings up Jonas.

_“Er war dort. Dann war er weg.”_

_“Wer? Jonas?”_

The boy goes quiet after that. Martha doesn’t ask again.

They search the area for a month, before Ulrich joins them, and stumbles over the bones and ripped fabrics of someone long gone.

He jumps away from the shoe he lodged his foot against, and steps on the Walkman trapped under a layer of leaves and tree roots.

It’s been a long time, but time is all there is, anyhow.

They bury Mads Nielsen under the gravestone in the cemetery. His mother doesn’t get to keep the Walkman – evidence, they call it. Ulrich calls it collateral, but it’s not something he tells anyone.

~

There’s no stranger in Winden that November, and there won’t ever be, but there is a priest with no name, hiding in shadows and clutching the promises of a dead man between bruised fingers and hidden shame.

There’s a priest with no true name, and four dead boys, and two suicides in a town that’s never experienced anything worse than what occurs every thirty-three years.

It’s Winden, and it is time. Nothing strange ever happens there.

**Author's Note:**

> Translations;
> 
> Er war dort. Dann war er weg. - He was there. Then he was gone.
> 
> Wer? Jonas? - Who? Jonas?


End file.
